The Kremlin's Candidate: A Novel полностью

“Golosov Ravine,” said DIVA, looking around. “It’s very famous to Muscovites. There are sacred stones, holy natural springs, and tales of phantoms appearing out of the fog. Thank you for coming. No problem getting clear?” This CIA boy looks smart, he’s calm, and handles himself well on the street. Not like Bratok but solid.

Walters shook his head, unzipping his backpack, mentally reviewing his meeting agenda. “Thank you, Colonel, for all you’ve done,” said Walters. “I’m aware of only a fraction of your service, but enough to know what you contribute.” A charmer, like Nathaniel Nash, she thought. Same purple halo too. Passionate.

“Call me Dominika,” she said. “Do you have my replacement equipment?” She saw his face fall. He told her quickly about the SRAC situation, and said that Simon Benford was working to get commo gear to her as soon as possible. In the meantime, Mr. Benford wanted her to have this. He held out a chunky sports watch inside a plastic bag, a precaution against metka.

“Are you people serious?” she said, carefully dipping into the bag, extracting then fingering the watch. Walters hurried to explain.

“Without SRAC, we’ll have to use personal meets—or dead drops—to pass intel and requirements. You know all the call-out signal sites, right?” Dominika nodded.

“This is different. The watch is a beacon, for emergencies. It’s connected to something called the Cospas-SARSAT rescue system, which is a maritime rescue locator with a GPS capability,” said Walters. “The beacon frequency is encrypted and hops around. It looks like background noise to nearby receivers. No triangulation.”

“Quite lovely, but what is its purpose?”

Walters did not know about Dominika’s militant opposition regarding exfiltration. “An exfil trigger. If you activate the beacon, and we geolocate the signal in Moscow, we’ll check every day at 2100 hours at the downtown pickup site,” said Ricky, reading off a small tablet. “You remember it, the twin phones to the right of the Filevsky Park metro station entrance? It’s less than a kilometer from your current apartment.” Dominika nodded. “If we geolocate your beacon near Petersburg, we use Red Route Two. You know that site. If your beacon transmits from Cape Idokopas, which we have designated as the Black Sea exfil site, you wait on the beach for pickup.”

“Exfiltration again? Another submarine?” asked Dominika, her voice suddenly edgy. She had once rescued a blown CIA agent by delivering him to a minisubmersible crewed by Navy SEALs in Neva Bay, near Petersburg.

“No, there’s something different,” said Walters, sweating despite the dank air in the ravine. He swiped at the tablet. “A manned minisubmarine takes time to deploy, and is slow. We have something new that’s always ready, and very fast. You will be taken off the beach in a USV, an unmanned surface vessel.” He showed her streaming images of a low-slung, fifty-foot, flush-deck speedboat painted gray overall, with wavy patterns of white and black camouflage. Dominika looked at Walters.

“You are telling me this boat has no one driving? There is no crew?” Ricky swallowed hard. Gable had warned him that DIVA could quickly get in a “horn tossin’ mood.”

“It is precisely computer controlled, steered by satellite, undetectable on radar, can loiter indefinitely, and is always available,” said Walters. “With this platform, maritime exfiltration from Putin’s Palace on the Black Sea becomes a viable option.”

“I will only be at the cape during the president’s four-day reception this fall in November, so it is not a viable site,” she said. “Besides, Gospodin Benford knows my attitude regarding fleeing and defecting. Didn’t he mention it to you?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” said Walters, trying to keep this together. Agent handling. More like playing a snake charmer’s pungi flute in front of a swaying cobra. He hurriedly dug into his backpack for another plastic envelope. “You wait on the shore, night or day, and you wear these infrared sunglasses so you’ll see the USV’s IR strobe two klicks out to sea. Just stand there and it’ll home in to the wristwatch. The thing’ll beach itself, glide up to you without a sound, like a horse nuzzling for a sugar cube. You climb up the toeholds on the stern, open the deck hatch and get in; watch your head, it’s tight. There’s a recliner-like chair, a seat belt, headphones, food and drink, heat control. Close the hatch, and the USV will do the rest.” He showed her more images.

“Where is this thing supposed to take me?”

“At fifty knots you’ll be twenty miles offshore at the pickup point with a gray hull in twenty-four minutes,” said Walters, proudly.